Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

This much will always translate: This much, they’ll each always recognize. She and the man both — nations inside nations. They may share nothing else but this, and music. But already, it’s enough. Already they’ve tried on the idea together. And that act of pretending becomes a fact all its own, too late to retract: a nation inside a nation inside a nation.

David is a wonder at dinner. Too quickly, he learns enough of the local dialect to follow each Daley, or at least seem to. Already he can tell her father’s send-ups from his oracular insights. He holds Charles captive with the tale of his flight from Vienna. He fascinates the twins, who scowl happily at how he works his knife and fork, keeping hold on both pieces, sawing and scooping at the same time, never letting go. He eats with enough zeal to overcome her mother’s first wave of wariness.

“This is amazing,” David says, pointing to the pork with his knife. “I’ve never tasted anything like it!”

Delia almost spits her mouthful across the table. She gags, hands in the air. David is first on his feet to whap her on the back and save her. The simple act of contact, even in emergency, stuns everyone. He touched her. But David Strom is first, too, back to the sacrament of food, as if no one at this table has almost choked to death.

Delia lasts out the meal. From afar, she makes out the music of her family’s speech, a thing she’s never heard, from inside it. Tonight, the words of that seven-member celebration are subdued, stopped down, toned up. She hears them in their hiding, all the sheltering clan construction in a place that would prefer you dead. Her blackness sits on her like a tight slip, something she’s never noticed, so wrapped in it is she. What can she look like to this man?

And still the meal goes better than she could hope. Ease would be too much to ask. But at least there’s no bloodshed. Everyone’s best efforts wreck Delia to look on. She would never be able to survive these two split worlds colliding were it not for the memory of the lost boy, their Ode. Without the mercy of those words traded on the monument’s steps, that glimpse of long time, this meal together would kill her.

After dinner, David entertains Michael with coin tricks. He shows the boy how to hang a spoon from his nose. He improvises a Cartesian diver, a spectacle that enthralls even Charles and the twins.

Nettie Ellen does her best: all that her religion asks of her. “You are a musician, too, Mr. Strom?”

“Oh, no! Not a real one. Just a — hmm? — a love-haver.”

“An amateur,” Delia says. “And he’s a good piece more than that.”

The amateur objects. “I can’t match your daughter. She is the real one.”

Nettie shakes her head, a puzzlement as deep as the one she was born into. “Well, we don’t have that piano sitting over there for nothing. You two sit down and make some music for us while me and the girls do the washing up.”

Delia objects. “We’ll wash the dishes, Mama. You made the meal, you give yourself a rest.”

“Nonsense. Let everybody serve God in their own fashion.”

She’ll not hear otherwise. So the two music makers sit, each, in their fashion, love-havers. They split the bench between them, careful not to touch each other. They play from Nettie’s hymnal: “He Leadeth Me,” the antique psalm, thunked out four-hand, SATB, straight from the page until David gets hold of the idiom. Little by little, warming to the old inheritance, Delia edges him down to the lower confines of the keyboard, absorbing first the tenor, then the bass, then all sorts of lines Strom didn’t realize were hiding in there. She lets loose, heading upward, stoking and embellishing, working into a swell that she knows, even as she strays into full-out gospel, is its own test: Are you sure? She probes to see just how he sees her, and yes, she checks to see if he can carry the chords for her while she spreads and flies.

Her father wanders through the room, pretending to be looking for things. At one point, Delia swears she hears him humming along. Maybe it could work after all, this act of total madness. Maybe they could make an America more American than the one the country has for centuries lied to itself about being.

Her mother comes into the parlor from the kitchen, dish towel in her hands, two aprons again flanking her Sunday-best dress. “Now that sounds just beautiful.” Delia hears, I know that sound. Now that is still my daughter.

When they lead “He Leadeth Me” into all the pastures it will willingly go, they negotiate a final cadence and turn to inspect each other. David Strom beams like a lighthouse, and she knows he would ask her, right then and there, to share all time with him, were it not for the warning her face beams back.

“Do you have this one?” he asks. And sparsely but musically, he lays down the outlines of a song she learned her freshman year, a tune simple enough to be among the hardest things she’s ever tried. His fingers clip through the chords, realizing only the simplest figured bass.

“You know this, too?” she asks. Then ashamed to hear herself. What membership is strong enough to keep them from having this same tune? All ownership is theft, and melody above all.

He stumbles through to the end of the first phrase. Without signal, they’re back at the beginning. She lands from above, square upon the first note, knowing he’s there underneath her. She sings with no chest at all. His fingers on the keys grow accurate, in her light. She imitates those pure resonators, a perfect tube of brass or wood. Her vibrato narrows to a point, thin enough to thread the eye of heaven. She floats in an aerial piano, motionless above the moving line:

Bist du bei mir, geh’ ich mit Freuden

zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh’.

Ach, wie vergnügt wär’ so mein Ende,

es drückten deine lieben Hände

mir die getreuen Augen zu!

If you are with me, I’ll go gladly to my death and to my rest. Together, they come back to tonic, dropping into held silence, the last element of any score. But before the quiet dies a natural death, a third voice punctures it. Brother Charlie sits on the arm of the sofa, his own makeshift balcony, shaking his head in admiration.

“Ain’t that the same song the whites used to sing, right after spending the day whipping us?”

“Hush up,” Delia says, “or I’m gonna whip you.”

“How far you planning to drift, sister Dee?”

“I’m not drifting, brother. I’m rowing, hard as I know how.”

Charlie nods. “When you get to the far shore, you think they’re going to fish you out?”

“Nobody needs to fish me out. I’m going to hit land and keep on moving.”

“Till you get to safety?”

“Not safety we’re talking about, Char.”

“Uh-uh. Mind your mama, now. Don’t call me Char.”

“Is this serious?” David says, two steps behind, by every measurable measure. “People used to sing this song while… Can this be so? This song was written…”

“Don’t pay the man any attention.” First time she’s ever called her brother a man.

Her father returns, saving them all from themselves. “Dr. Strom?” Dr. Daley says. “Would you mind answering an amateur’s questions? I almost hate asking…” Delia spins from one threat to the other. Her father hates asking like the rabbit hates the brier patch. “But I can’t wrap my thinking around this one little thing.”

Delia braces. Now it will come: the mighty blow of Things as They Are, blasting the dream she and this stranger have been hiding in. Not even love can survive the facts. She holds still and waits. How foolish to think the angel might pass over them, to imagine they could escape this, her father’s one little question. The question is out there, running through the streets of the Seventh Ward, over in Harlem, across the Black Belt that rings South Chicago. The question the workless half of her race, annihilated at every turn, wants to ask. The question no person of David’s race can answer or even hear. She hangs her head and mouths the words, knowing them already — the one little thing her father can’t wrap his thinking around.